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March 2018

Friday, 30 March 2018

I’ve been rather quiet here because over the last week I have made a concerted effort to study the Belgian Highway Code for the theory part of the driving-licence exam.

I have been intending to do this (on and off, more off than on because in my heart of hearts I am terrified of driving) for about a hundred years. I think everyone who knows me had given up hope I would ever actually do it.

But suddenly I thought – Bugger it, I’ll just do it. So I did.

And I’ve passed! No one is more surprised than I am. So, here’s a picture of me in about four months’ time... (from here). Watch out, Belgium.

Friday, 23 March 2018

Last Saturday I took the train to Brussels to meet up with a friend from university, and we went to see an exhibition called Real Bodies. It is an exhibition which I think has toured much of the world, and it consists of bodies and body parts which have been preserved by removing all the water and fats from the body and replacing them with acetone and silicone rubber, polyester or epoxy resin. The bodies were dissected so be warned: there is a graphic photograph coming up.

It was a very cold, dark day and there was a light dusting of snow everywhere. This is Tour en Taxis, an area of Brussels that has been fairly recently renovated and where the exhibition was displayed. The building on the right used to be a post office sorting house.

The exhibition was in the basement, which added a layer of gloom to the proceedings, and it was the strangest exhibition I have ever seen. On the one hand, it was an absolutely fascinating lesson in anatomy, and I could not but marvel at the human body, so complex and so beautifully constructed. On the other, it was deeply unsettling and made me feel faintly nauseous. These had been real people; admittedly they had donated their bodies to science* but it did resemble an artistically arranged butcher’s shop. The method of preservation gave everything a waxy appearance which I found quite repellent. The bodies were posed – playing football, running – to show different sets of muscles in tension but I also felt uncomfortable about that, as if it were disrespectful, although of course the owners of the bodies probably didn’t mind about that any more. Oddly enough I did not consciously think about my own mortality but perhaps this was at the back of my mind and therefore contributing to my unease. A disturbing experience.

Has anyone else seen this (I believe that an earlier version of it was simply called Bodies)? What did you think?

* So I believed when we went but I have subsequently discovered that there is some controversy over this which is making me feel even more ambivalent.

Friday, 16 March 2018

(The Unicorn in Captivity, South Netherlands, 1495–1505, tapestry of wool, silk, silver, gilt; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; found here)

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she till moved like a shadow on the sea.

Although this is a classic of American fantasy, I had never heard of it until a couple of years ago when my daughter became obsessed with the animated film of it; I too found it compelling, somewhat to my surprise. It’s what the offspring of Harry Clarke’s imagination would have resembled had it married prog rock and, believe me, that is no bad thing at all. Despite sometimes weak animation and drawing, it is an exceptionally good film.

Despite my enjoyment of the film I held off acquiring the novel for a long time. I had been burned by my experience with The Princess Bride. Friends, please don’t hate me for this, but I disliked that novel intensely. I couldn’t finish it, the tone and the humour, which I found both lumpen and smart-alecky, grated on me so much. I entirely concede that it’s well-plotted, it’s original, I enjoyed the frame story, I appreciated the narrative vigour and ingenuity; I just hated something about the writing. However, I did worry that I had set it up for failure with expectations that were too high. I did not want that to happen with The Last Unicorn. In fact, by the time I actually started Peter Beagle’s novel, my expectations were so low I’d have been grateful if he could string a sentence together.

Good news: he can. Maybe I should try The Princess Bride again, because I was enchanted by The Last Unicorn, which is charming and thoughtful. The plot is fairly simple: a unicorn becomes conscious that all the other unicorns in the world have disappeared and that she is the last, so she starts on a quest to learn what has happened to the others. She is accompanied by Schmendrick, a failed magician working in a freak show, and Molly Grue, the discontented lover of the leader of a forest-dwelling band of outlaws, as she traces the unicorns to the barren castle of King Haggard.

The book is elegaic, nostalgic, and written in a consciously poetic language which deftly remains just this side of overly portentous. (Though there are also nice little jabs of humour that made me laugh.) The unicorn is immortal but experiences the horror of old age through the magic of the old witch, Mommy Fortuna, who runs the freak show, and mortality itself when she is changed into a human:

‘I am myself still. This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?’

On the other hand, being immortal in a world of mortals sometimes leads the unicorn into a sense of dislocation and loneliness:

The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache; swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself. Often then, between the rush of one breath and the reach of another, it came to her that Schmendrick and Molly were long dead, and King Haggard as well, and the Red Bull met and mastered – so long ago that the grand-children of the stars that had seen it all happen were withering now, turning to coal – and that she was still the only unicorn in the world.

She is further troubled by the fact that most human beings cannot see her for what she really is; they mistake her for a beautiful white mare, although they are also disturbed by her. Thus, in the freak show, Mommy Fortuna affixes a fake horn to her forehead before she displays her as a unicorn. Mommy Fortuna knows very well that the unicorn is a real unicorn, but most people can only perceive and understand a fake unicorn. Later, disguised as a woman, the unicorn begins to lose herself and become human in spirit as well as in shape: you become what you appear to be.

In the greenwood, Schmendrick spends an uncomfortable evening with Captain Cully and his outlaws. Cully is preoccupied with his own fame: ‘How do they speak of me in your country? What have you heard of dashing Captain Cully and his band of freemen?’ and Schmendrick lies:

‘They sing a ballad of you in my country [...] I forget just how it goes –’

Captain Cully spun like a cat ambushing its own tail. ‘Which one?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ Schmendrick answered, taken aback. ‘Is there more than one?’

‘Aye, indeed!’ Cully cried, glowing and growing, as though pregnant with his pride. ‘Willie Gentle! Willie Gentle! Where is the lad?’

A lank-haired youth with a lute and pimples shambled up. ‘Sing one of my exploits for the gentleman,’ Captain Cully ordered him. ‘Sing the one about how you joined my band. I’ve not heard it since Tuesday last.’

In the ballads lies Cully’s chance of immortality and his ‘true’ reputation, sadly not matched by his ‘real’ acts. Far from being a brave and noble outlaw, he is just a petty robber who steals from the poor and pays a monthly tribute to the local mayor to stay out of gaol. Schmendrick conjures a vision of Robin Hood and his Merry Men and the outlaws are so delighted and entranced that they run off through the forest after them, moved but also deceived by art – and yet the deception is a noble as well as a ridiculous deception, the outlaws respond to the beauty and nobility of the phantom Robin Hood even if they can’t respond to the real beauty and magic of the unicorn.

Beagle likes playing little meta games about literature throughout the novel, poking at that fourth wall with asides on heroes and how stories work, never plainer however than in this episode. (And he writes excellent pastiche ballads and songs – it is in fact a very musical book.) He shows himself conscious of his story’s roots in fairy tale and myth – I am writing about a band of outlaws in the forest and look here is Robin Hood, über-outlaw! – and in that consciousness lies a sadness – Robin Hood is not ‘real’ – and a nostalgia – for a time when it was possible to believe in a noble and heroic figure like Robin Hood. Nowadays we can only accept him as a mythical figure, not a ‘real’ person: instead we have the cowardly and venal Cully as a more ‘believable’ character. Beagle’s meta-fictional nods allow him and us to enjoy a fairy tale about a unicorn while still remaining ‘grown-up’ and knowing: they make a magical children’s story into something sophisticated enough for us to read without being mistaken for children ourselves, yet all the time that we are reading we feel sadness that it is not ‘true’ and that we can only see beautiful white mares, not unicorns. Like J.M. Barrie, like A.A. Milne, Beagle mourns the loss of childhood.

Tuesday, 13 March 2018

Amazing news! I have finally finished rereading The Portrait of a Lady. And it is clear to me that if I am not to be reduced to reading nothing more demanding than the oeuvre of Enid Blyton, I had better start spending less time on the internet. My attention span appears to be the size of a gnat’s these days.

Despite my mental feebleness I have thoroughly enjoyed the novel and am keener than before to read The Wings of a Dove which, Graham Greene assures me in the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, is a variation on the same basic plot. I have been thinking more about what I wrote last time, James’s wonderful ability to use metaphor to turn an emotional or cognitive state into a concrete image; an example being about Henrietta’s nosiness into Goodwood’s private business: ‘this enquiring authoress was constantly flashing her lantern into the quiet darkness of his soul’. Do other writers do this and I just haven’t noticed, or is it a peculiarity of Henry James’s? There seems something very particular about it.

Even though I have read the novel before I had completely forgotten the most significant revelation near the end of it and was completely gobsmacked. The actual ending was open yet bleak as James’s endings always seem to be (well, of those of his works I’ve read), and yet perhaps not completely bleak. Isabel returns to Rome because she has promised Pansy she will, repaying a betrayal (not Pansy’s!) with loyalty. And Ralph has left her the use of Gardencourt for a year; the novel has proved Ralph to be prescient and so perhaps Isabel will not stay long with horrible Osmond after all.

Which brings me to something I haven’t yet been able to resolve: what are Isabel’s rights? She married a American in Italy but in an American church. Which nation’s jurisdiction applies to her? Were she British and married in Britain, her property and money would have become her husband’s, but perhaps the US or Italy had more liberal laws? (This is assuming that Isabel might overcome her reverence for the institution of marriage and its duties.)

Another possible bright light at the end of the novel is Henrietta’s future. True, there is not one single precedent of a happy marriage in this book and true, Ralph’s previous experiment in bequests ended disastrously. Like Isabel, I’m a tiny bit sorry that she is going to marry, but at least they know each other well. And this time Ralph seems to have directed his legacy more wisely, in giving his money to Henrietta to start a newspaper and work. I was quite annoyed on Henrietta’s behalf to discover that in this edition of The Portrait of a Lady, revised by James in 1907, the author altered passages about her to make her more of a caricature. She deserves better than that!

Having spent so much time with the characters and known them so deeply, I cannot stop wondering about what will happen to them... Thanks again to Dolce Bellezza, for precipitating this, even though I’ve finished so much later than everyone else in the readalong!

(Antonio da Correggio, Adoration of the Child, 1518–20, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; from here; surprisingly – to me, anyway – ‘Henrietta had a special devotion to this intimate scene – she thought it the most beautiful picture in the world’; perhaps from this we are meant to realise that Henrietta too would like a family?)

Saturday, 10 March 2018

(Untitled picture on Pinterest: please let me know if you can provide any more information about it!)

Like many other people I am a clutterish hoarder with too many books, and in Gallimaufry Towers we are reaching Peak Book and yet I find it difficult to prise more than a few volumes from my claws and pass them on to charity bookshops, friends and relatives. Having read Annabel’s and Lory’s reviews of Marie Kondo’s The Magical Art of Tidying Up, I wondered if I might find some help there. As in, a magical way of having a tidy house without actually getting rid of anything or doing any tidying. To make the experience extra wholemeal, I read the book in Dutch (Opgeruimd!, since you ask).

Well, I didn’t finish it. It had the unexpected effect of making me think that perhaps I didn’t really have a problem after all! I mean, I don’t have clothes I don’t wear – though I don’t trot out in my Best Dresses very often, they definitely have a place – and I don’t have sixty toothbrushes. I perhaps have a few too many tea-cups but I don’t trouble myself about that. I can see that there is plenty of useful advice there, and some not-very-useful advice; take from it what you will and leave the rest. However, I would say that although I appreciate it’s a book about tidying up and not a psychology tome, Kondo’s failure to address the over-consumption that lies at the heart of overstuffed houses was an important lacuna in her book. Of course only keep what is of value to you, but perhaps extend that thoughtfulness to what you bring into the house in the first place...

(I would also add, as someone who has moved house many, many times in her life, that line about once you have experienced a tidy home you will never be untidy again is crap. Or at least in my case. Every time I move into a new place everything was very orderly at first and then slowly became... less so.)

Anyway, Kondo’s advice for books – get rid of anything you haven’t read because you’ll never read it, tear out the pages – shriek! – that you find meaningful from those you have read and chuck the rest of the book – was not directly helpful to me. Nor did magic spill out of the book and transform my house, but since I borrowed the book from the library I shan’t be asking for my money back, ho ho.

However, I did like the idea of holding things and deciding whether or not they ‘sparked joy’. And this is leading me to reconsider the way I perceive my book collection, I think we can call it that. Until now I have stored my books against the day when I’ll want to reread them, and some have been reread, several times even, and some are still waiting for their second airing. If there’s even a small possibility that I – or even my daughter! – might enjoy a book later in life, it stays. (And now we have reached that inevitable point when that is unmanageable.) I suspect that this is part because my formative years were pre-Internet, when it was not always very easy to find certain books.

When I were a lass, there was of course no internet and acquiring books, especially anything out of print, was dependent on your finding them. Once you’d found a book you liked, unless it was a bestseller it was as well to hang on to it as you might never come across it again. You see it’s not my fault I’m a hoarder, I was compelled by circumstances. The internet has brought us an age of plenty, in terms of books. If you pass one on and then decide you want to reread it – and, crucially of course, you have the money – you can find it again quite easily. Assuming – quite a big assumption, looking at the political present – that the Apocalypse doesn’t strike, I do not need to keep books any more solely on the off-chance I might reread them.

Instead of considering my books as a single and discrete unit relying on my maintenance and love and protection, therefore, I am trying to think of them now as part of the great world of books, a sort of continuum, maybe even an inert organism if that is possible. This world sends me books and books can be reabsorbed into it, through judicious sharing and donation. It is not hard to acquire or borrow most books. I do not, therefore, need to cling onto those I own as a drowning woman to a raft, but can allow them to float on. Of course, there is a danger here of slipping into over-consumption, just buying and then giving away...

I also started thinking about the Renaissance, when those fortunate wealthy few who had access to books were not widely read but deeply read. They were steeped in their literature. And it made me think that perhaps I should try to see my books in that light; I should keep the books in which I’m steeped, the ones that have made me (a variation I suppose on Marie Kondo’s ‘sparking joy’) irrespective of whether I’ll read them again. Meanwhile, I am curbing my lust for new books as much as possible this year so that I can get the number of unread books down to a more reasonable size.

(Nicholas Hilliard, portrait in miniature of Mary Sidney, ca. 1590, National Portrait Gallery; found here; Mary Sidney was a poet, alchemist and salonista who did not have to cull her books very often since she lived in a castle)

This new approach to my books feels revolutionary to me; it probably isn’t to anyone else, I appreciate that. Whether it makes any great difference when I start sorting through them is of course another story.

Editor’s note: I have added a couple of paragraphs I missed out when I originally posted this.

Friday, 09 March 2018

Civilisations have risen and fallen since I started rereading The Portrait of a Lady, but I am now on the home straight. (Meanwhile, I haven’t read my FebruaryWhat Shall Helen Read? book, Small Island, but I shall as soon as I finish this.) Now that Marie Kondo and I have parted ways (more on this soon!) I have a little more time for Henry James and I thought I’d pause and think about this next part that I’ve read.

We have skipped forward three years, and Isabel is now unhappily married to Gilbert Osmond who has turned out to be a prize git who really wanted a wife he could shape to reflect his own ideas – a bigger version of the tiny Pansy, I suppose, who is devoted to her papa and does everything she can to please him. Isabel feels that Osmond does have a reason to feel aggrieved, because she was so eager to impress him during their courtship she perhaps made it seem that she was less independent and energetic than she really was. In a way she feels aggrieved with him too, but acknowledges that no one compelled her to marry him: she chose of her own free will. She feels that part of her choice was wanting to bestow her money on her husband, whom she believed a fit recipient. Without her fortune, would she have married him? It seems unlikely that he would have married her.

Considering how disastrously her own marriage has turned out, Isabel’s decision to interfere in Pansy’s future merely to curry favour with Osmond shocked me. She justifies this to herself by remarking that Pansy is docile and obedient, as if these qualities mean that she has no views or feelings of her own. In another novel perhaps the doll-like Pansy would turn out to be a psychopathic killer, but I don’t recall The Portrait of a Lady ending in a bloodbath. Isabel wishes to deny Pansy the freedom to choose for herself that she, Isabel, was able to exercise. In fairness, perhaps Isabel feels that her own bad choice of a mate proves that girls in love do not have very good judgement and someone wiser and more experienced should take charge. Still, it is surprising that she considers herself to be that person, what with her record of character misjudgement... Fortunately, she now seems to be rethinking her interference, if only because she is becoming increasingly doubtful of Lord Warburton’s motivation in offering for Pansy’s hand. But I fear that Pansy’s future will be as grey as that of every other married woman in the novel. Even if she is allowed her choice of Edward Rosier, I am not sure she would be happy, since his appreciation of her principally as an aesthetic and pure object is not so very different from Osmond’s attitude towards Isabel (though Rosier seems a bit silly rather than malignant).

I am enjoying James’s way of using unexpected, detailed and beautiful similes to describe his characters; he uses physical things and spaces to delineate their metaphysical states. He has just described the Countess as:

like a bright rare shell, with a polished surface and a remarkably pink lip, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess’s spiritual principle, a little loose nut that tumbled about inside of her.

For me, it’s the flourish of ‘the remarkably pink lip’ which really makes this simile so precisely suited to the Countess; it’s particular and makes the simile concrete; it conveys something of her hard, frivolous and licentious character. And the rattle is her silly chatter, her rattle-pate. But I really love this description of the Osmond marriage, which turns their relationship into a physical space:

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

Such a horrific evocation of the kind of living entombment Isabel must now endure.